Uncertainty

Knight's distinction is clean and consequential: risk is measurable probability; uncertainty is not. Insurance handles risk; entrepreneurship handles uncertainty. Profit exists precisely because some situations cannot be…

Akutagawa's 1922 short story presents a single violent event through seven contradictory testimonies, none of which can be reconciled into a master account — a formal argument that objective truth in human affairs may be…

Stigler's opening move in what became the economics of information: if information is costly to acquire, then price dispersion in a market is not a sign of irrationality but the rational equilibrium outcome of search beh…

Akerlof's foundational demonstration that information asymmetry alone can destroy a market. Using the used car trade as his model — where sellers know whether a car is good or a "lemon" but buyers cannot tell — he shows…

Arrow, the Nobel laureate who formalised the economics of uncertainty and information asymmetry, distills his life's work into a short exposition. The central argument is that markets for information do not behave like m…

Saffo, a long-time futurist at the Institute for the Future, reduces forecasting to six rules that most planners violate: define a cone of uncertainty rather than a single prediction, look for the S-curve, embrace the th…

David Haig's play dramatises the 1944 confrontation between Scottish meteorologist James Stagg and General Eisenhower over whether weather conditions would permit the D-Day landings — a decision where imperfect data, ins…

Duke, a former professional poker player turned decision-science teacher, argues that the quality of a decision and the quality of its outcome are different things, and that treating them as the same is the single most e…